


Run It Up the Flagpole

by ClockworkCourier



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Childhood Friends, Coming Out, F/F, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M, POV Alternating, Prompt Fill, Secret Crush, Teenagers, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-08-08 06:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7746106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkCourier/pseuds/ClockworkCourier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It started with a rather unfair trade-off; a hoodie for a really crappy bologna sandwich. Like, an Oscar Mayer, Kraft pseudo-cheese, extremely gross white bread kind of sandwich, half smashed in a Ziploc bag. What said disgusting, smashed sandwich and a two year old fleece hoodie had to do with Gabe’s now legendary downfall was almost mysterious, but if Gabe read into it, fate might have had something to do with it, too. Not that he’d ever been a big believer in fate, with or without the big F, but it’s the little things after all.</p><p>And he did eat the sandwich.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run It Up the Flagpole

**Author's Note:**

> So a very lovely anon sent me this prompt on Tumblr: 
> 
> _ok but imagine like, r76 highschool au where jack is either like, the popular quarterback that is like oblivious, and gabe is the angry kid thats too gay for his own goddamn good OR gabe is the all star broody favorite and jack is just the backwards country kid with a blinding smile who pines after gabe until gabe is like damn this guy has really nice eyes wtf_
> 
> Originally, it was just going to be a oneshot, buuuut not so much. My original oneshot turned into a big ol' outline and now there's no turning back.
> 
> Pretty much it's the Gabe is all-star fave, Jack's his childhood friend with a massive crush, and it's just a lot of cute and good lord I'm gonna need a cavity filled after this. Also, tiny first chapter. Next chapter, not so tiny. Promise.

It started with a rather unfair trade-off; a hoodie for a really crappy bologna sandwich. Like, an Oscar Mayer, Kraft pseudo-cheese, extremely gross white bread kind of sandwich, half smashed in a Ziploc bag. What said disgusting, smashed sandwich and a two year old fleece hoodie had to do with Gabe’s now legendary downfall was almost mysterious, but if Gabe read into it, fate might have had something to do with it, too. Not that he’d ever been a big believer in fate, with or without the big F, but it’s the little things after all.

And he did eat the sandwich.  
  
\---

But really, it started before the start. It started before the hoodie was ever sewn together and put through a machine that would screenprint Gabe’s last name bright yellow on black fabric right over his ass. And it started before the nasty white bread was baked, the Kraft cheese was printed or whatever the hell they do in that alien factory, and before Oscar Meyer could alchemize actual meat into flat pink grossness.

If Gabe had to even try to pick a moment at all, he would probably have said that it started on the first day of second grade, when he spied the new kid from across the room, walking in the door with his hand firmly gripping his mother’s. Gabe hadn’t thought much of him then (actually, he was thinking about his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and how it was only three hours until lunch) but he had enough sense of presence to know that the kid was new. The teacher went through roll, announced him as John Morrison (”Jack!” the kid happily corrected, and the teacher just smiled and corrected it on the sheet), and nothing else was really said beyond that point. At lunch, Jack Morrison seemed to magnetize to Gabe for no reason other than their desks were right next to each other. Jack sidled up to him with a quiet screech of desk-on-tile, held up a single cosmic brownie like a peace offering, and smiled at him, exposing a gap where his two front teeth were missing.

“Your teeth are gone,” Gabe said as a greeting, pulling his sandwich out of a paper bag marked with ‘Mijo’ and a Sharpie-scrawled heart. Then, as an afterthought (actually, it was at the forefront of his mind because who turns down a cosmic brownie), he took the brownie and set it on the other side of his desk on the off chance that Jack would want it back.

“Mhmm,” Jack said, and then prodded at the gap with his thumb. “My dad told me to tell people I got in a fight with a bear and the bear knocked my teeth out.”

Gabe’s eyebrows went up. “Did it?”

“Nope. My brother accidentally hit me in the face with the bathroom door,” he said, with a little whistle on the ‘s’ sound of ‘accidentally’. And that was the end of the matter. Jack enthusiastically dug into a very different bologna sandwich, biting it with the corner of his mouth.

So, maybe that was the start of it; the start of their friendship or the start of _something_.

\---

By the start of third grade, Gabe and Jack had become their own weird little item. They were close enough that Jack’s mom had just taken to calling them ‘JacknGabe’ as one word, addressing them both. After school, it was a rock-paper-scissors game of which house to go to. And then that had to be adjusted, because Gabe learned that Jack went with rock out of habit. It morphed into a coin toss at some point, with Gabe as heads and Jack as tails. Really, it didn’t matter who won, because the Reyes and Morrison households quickly became accustomed to seeing both boys on any given day, and Mrs. Reyes and Mrs. Morrison both joked about having ‘shared custody’ of the two of them.

The remaining years of elementary school became a constant gauntlet of doing homework, resolutely not doing homework, the consistent pestering of older and younger siblings, video games, cheap pizza, taco nights, movie nights, and ten thousand other things. By the time sixth grade rolled around, they were trained in the fine art of pooling loose change together for movies or grocery store runs, well-versed in the delicate finesse needed to sneak out at night and hang out in the park by Jack’s house, and had the envied ability to finish off a single pizza between the two of them in less than a half an hour. The two of them moved as a single unit, never one without the other if they could help it.

Even if Gabe had known the phrase ‘halcyon days’ at that age, he didn’t think he would have used it. Being Jack’s other half just seemed like the way of things.

But things change, as everything does. And if Gabe had to look at that metaphorical scrapbook again and point out the day where things really changed, he would have immediately picked the first day of middle school.

Again, it wasn’t like there was an actual day when things changed. It was another slow progression of time, since they actually started off middle school excited and enthusiastic, with Gabe’s mom driving both of them to the front doors of the junior high school and rolling her eyes at the chatter between the two of them.

“Okay, so, basketball team. We’re doing that,” Jack said, twisting against the seatbelt so he could put his feet up on Gabe’s knees. “And my sister said we should get into student council early, because that’ll look good on college applications or whatever.”

Gabe snorted and flicked one of Jack’s knees, right over the worn down denim. “We’re in seventh grade, dork. We don’t need to think about college yet.”  
  
“It’s important! Anyway, I’m thinking... vice president. Not too much responsibility like the president, but still a lot.”

“Jesús, Jack, chill out,” Gabe retorted, only to earn a well-aimed swat on the top of his head from his mother from the driver’s seat.

“Quit taking the lord’s name in vain, mijo,” she said sharply.

“Sorry, mamá,” Gabe apologized, and then gave Jack a glare, the intensity of which was offset a little by the grin he was fighting back. “Look, now you got me in trouble.”

“ _Both_ of you are trouble. Not just you, Gabriel,” his mom said before she turned into the parking lot.

He couldn’t fight his grin back anymore, and neither could Jack.

They ended up with completely different classes, with not a single hour matching, including their lunch hour. Gabe didn’t think much of that at the time, especially when they mutually agreed that they would just have to meet each other at the end of the day anyway and do homework or whatever they would end up doing that would inevitably _not_ be homework. It seemed like a perfect conclusion to the issue.  
  
When they walked back out to Gabe’s mom’s car at the end of the day, with syllabi in hand and textbooks weighing their bags down and stories about their teachers and the new kids, Gabe didn’t think anything had changed. He didn’t feel any shift in the air or hear a disembodied voice telling him that things weren’t going to be same from that day forward. They simply got in the car, chatting the entire way back, and went about their practiced routine of artfully destroying a pepperoni pizza and playing video games until Jack’s mom finally came to pick him up after the sun had set.  
  
And even when Gabe was laying on his bed, picking at the fraying fabric edging his quilt and squinting in the dark to see the pale specks of the remainders of glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, he didn’t feel different. He thought of the weird kid in his third hour math class who wore a cowboy hat, or the girl in his earth science class with the wide eyes behind her glasses and who grinned at him like she had known him forever, or the black-haired girl in his English class who grimaced when he looked at her like she had caught a bad smell. And then, of course, he thought of Jack. And he didn’t think of Jack as anything less than his best friend, because that just went without saying, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://radiojamming.tumblr.com) ;O


End file.
